The Sanchism Denture

When the press opens and every headline seems dominated by corruption — “bite,” “bite here,” “bite there” — it’s hard not to feel as if Spain has turned into a safari where the only thing still standing is the bite itself. The columnist seizes on a vivid metaphor: the idea that Spanish public life has become dominated by mordidas — literally “bites” of corruption — and that these bites suggest a society gnawed at by rot rather than governed by law.

In Argentina, corruption is often called coima, but in Spain the word mordida resonates differently, combining the notions of crime and dentadura — the jaws and teeth of a system that seem to be chewing the citizenry alive. The image is visceral: toxic processed foods, political “trans fats,” and moral decay that clog institutional arteries, raising the “cholesterol” of indignation and creating chronic societal illness that the system cannot metabolise.

The columnist argues that corruption is no longer just a series of scandals but an epidemic, too widespread and systemic to be confined to any single political faction. The sanchism of Pedro Sánchez has given particular sophistication to what is described as a caribbean-style institutional plunder, but the problem is not exclusive to one party. From left to right, populist extremes to recycled technocrats, the piece maintains, many political actors have been funded opaquely or fail to disclose how they sustain themselves — and transparency is nowhere to be found in the political centre.

Santos Cerdán, described here as the lightning rod of sanchism, symbolises how political actors become scapegoats for a deeper moral malaise — the mordida so pervasive that it has soaked society like acid rain. The columnist invokes Václav Havel’s notion that “the true test of a leader is how he acts when no one is watching”, arguing that too many officials behaved as if no one ever would — confident of their impunity.

Looking beyond individual cases, the article warns that Spain’s democratic framework increasingly resembles a set of rotten teeth. Not just one bad bit, but an entire dentadura podrida — a decayed political structure whose moral infection demands more than speeches or investigations: it demands a figurative dentist capable of extracting, cleaning and healing the corrupt core.

In the end, the piece closes on a stark note: the public doesn’t need another politician; it needs a moral odontology, a specialist who can pull the decayed pieces and restore health to a political body that has been continuously bitten by scandal.